Taking out the trash for most families is a daily chore. You know the routine. Everything your family has thrown away goes into a trash can. The average American family generates about four pounds of trash every day! That's 1,460 pounds of trash per person every year. Multiply that by the number of people living in the United States; and you'll realize that we, as a nation, throw away about 210 million tons of stuff each year. It comes from our homes, businesses, government agencies, and institutions like schools and hospitals. But where does it all go? About 27 percent of it is recycled or composted, and 16 percent is burned, but the majority (57 percent) is buried in landfills.
There is a need for improved methods and devices for economically storing buried trash in landfills.